Yahoo Answers

» see answers.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

yahoo answers launched in december 2005. you typed a question into a textbox. anyone with a yahoo account could answer. the asker picked a "best answer" or the community voted on it. for the first few years yahoo answers was a useful resource for niche questions where stack overflow did not exist yet. by 2008 it had become something else entirely.

the something else is the cultural artifact yahoo answers is remembered for. people would post questions that were either deeply confused or genuinely absurd. "how is babby formed" was a 2008 meme that spread on every forum on the english internet for a year. "is my son gay" was a recurring thread template that got compiled into youtube videos. the absurd questions became copypasta and they became part of the visual language of mid-2000s internet humor.

i used yahoo answers occasionally between 2007 and 2010. mostly for technical questions about ubuntu and pirated games when stack overflow was still building its catalog and donanimhaber's forum did not have an answer. the responses were a mix of useful and wrong, with occasional drama from strangers thrown in. you read three replies, picked the one that seemed least crazy, moved on.

~ the case file ~

~ how it became a meme ~

the platform's design enabled the absurdity. anyone could post. the askers were often kids or non-native english speakers or people experiencing genuine confusion in real time. the answerers were often equally confused, with occasional jokers piling on. yahoo's moderation was minimal. the result was a stream of human reality that was mostly weird in some specific way.

internet culture archived this. tumblr accounts curated the funniest yahoo answers questions for years, and youtube compilations of "the worst yahoo answers" got millions of views. some of the questions and answers became reference points you could cite in any conversation about internet weirdness and the other person would know what you meant.

this absurd-archive was a real cultural asset. it was a snapshot of how millions of people actually thought about questions when nobody was watching. the modern internet is more performed. yahoo answers was the unfiltered version of "what does an average person on earth want to know."

~ the end ~

yahoo announced the shutdown in march 2021. they gave six weeks notice. on 20 april 2021 the site stopped accepting new questions. on 4 may 2021 the site went read-only. on 30 june 2021 the entire archive was deleted. yahoo did not work with archivists to preserve it. archive team scrambled to crawl what they could in the six weeks of notice.

the actual reasons were the usual reasons. yahoo's parent company at the time (verizon, then apollo) was shedding products that did not generate enough revenue. yahoo answers required moderation and infrastructure costs against a user base that had been declining for years. there was no business reason to keep it running.

the archive purge is what makes the shutdown a loss. yahoo answers was a 15-year record of internet humanity in a particular era. yahoo deleted the public artifacts. the wayback machine has fragmentary coverage but most of it is gone. this is one of the larger cultural-data losses on the modern internet.

~ what carried over ~

the meme catalog. "how is babby formed" and a dozen other recurring templates are still in circulation. they outlived the site that produced them.

the lesson about archive responsibility. when a platform that hosts billions of human posts shuts down, there is a real choice between cooperating with archivists or just deleting. yahoo chose to delete. tumblr made similar choices later. modern platforms generally do not preserve their content when they shut down.

the open community-q&a archetype. quora is the same model with curation. stack exchange is the same model with rigid quality control. reddit has the same shape inside any given subreddit. all of them inherit something from yahoo answers, and the lessons quora and stack exchange learned about moderation came partly from watching yahoo answers' chaos.

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